Milwaukee Bucks’ impact goes beyond bubble, reviving calls for action on racial injustice
All 16 of the Milwaukee Bucks’ players and their collective decision to boycott Game 5 Wednesday afternoon will have an immeasurable impact in the fight for social justice.
They may have not known going into it, but the Milwaukee Bucks‘ players decision to take a stand Wednesday afternoon reignited a conversation that has repeatedly been put on the backburner for centuries.
The courageousness that all 16 Bucks players showed on Wednesday in their collective decision to boycott Game 5 of the first round playoff series with the Orlando Magic has been felt beyond just the game of basketball, or the sports world as a whole.
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The shooting of Jacob Blake over the weekend, which occurred in Kenosha and just 40 minutes south of Milwaukee, stoked the very fears all NBA players, not just the Bucks, had prior to resuming this NBA season down in the bubble in Orlando.
The social injustice slogans on the backs of players’ jerseys, kneeling for the national anthem before games and continued calls for the police officers that killed Breonna Taylor in her bed to be arrested (and they still haven’t) had done little-to-no effect on turning the discussion into action.
The subsequent frustration from players such as Norman Powell, Jayson Tatum and Fred VanVleet around the bubble grew into disenchantment of resuming the season as planned. Even Bucks guard George Hill mentioned after the team’s Game 4 win earlier in the week that “we shouldn’t have even come to this damn place.”
If Hill wanted to change the narrative, he and all 16 Bucks players reclaimed the plot, the narrative and the world’s attention on the issues that matter most and shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle, even with any attempt to return to normalcy amid a global pandemic. Along the way, they sparked the wave of postponements we saw across the NBA, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and the WNBA all throughout Wednesday evening.
On the surface, it’s very easy to equate August26 to when the NBA first shut down earlier this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Only this time, there was no outside force coming in and stopping the world as we knew it. The Bucks players inside that locker room took it upon themselves to take a stand for not only what they believe in, but what is right after seeing yet another incident of police brutality infect not just a country tearing at the seams, but the state of Wisconsin itself.
Not even during a global pandemic could these race-related killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or shootings like that of Blake at the hands of police officers stop under any circumstances. And the fact that the Bucks, an organization who has a first-hand account of police brutality through Sterling Brown’s wrongful arrest and has taken it upon themselves to speak on such issues, led the charge on all of this hasn’t been lost on anyone.
Now questions lie ahead regarding what lies ahead for the rest of the playoffs and the conclusion of a 2019-20 season that may very well end up going unfinished. It already took an incredible set of measures for the league to resume the season late last month and who knows how a strike would affect the already muddy waters when it comes to enacting a plan for the 2020-21 season.
But none of that matters if society can’t function in a place where the season can be played safely to begin with, which is already a major question unto itself on top of the precarious state of American society in 2020.
What the Bucks did Wednesday afternoon was regain the focus on the cause at hand, the systemic racism that has torn apart the country and people of color for centuries. All 16 Bucks players knew the risks of making the decision to boycott Game 5 against the Magic and putting themselves out there in that position. And the rest of the NBA has followed suit for the time being, following in the footsteps of the Bucks’ leadership and bravery.
There’s no telling what comes next, but through their actions, the Bucks voiced their message loud and clear, as they have for months. This time, though, the whole world watched them call for the change that they and all people of color throughout this country so desperately seek.